MacroIDE

MacroIDE is a minimal yet powerful macro editor for Rhino. It provides a professional-grade code editor featuring syntax highlighting and code-completion for Rhino commands, RhinoScript, and Python, hosted in a dockable Rhino panel.

MacroIDE features comprehensive keyboard-shortcut handling, fine-grained customization, session-to-session persistence, and an integrated Macro Compiler, for easily turning macros into standalone Rhino plugins.

While writing macros in Rhino has always been powerful, MacroIDE makes it efficient, not to mention fun!

While Rhino does provide a macro editor out of the box, it is very primitive, and not especially user-friendly.

MacroIDE, on the other hand, provides a coding experience as enjoyable as it is efficient, through comprehensive support for undo & redo, as well as keyboard shortcuts for selecting, commenting, indenting, searching, and replacing code.

MacroIDE also knows that your macros may in fact contain multiple types of code, from Rhino commands, to RhinoScript and Python, contained within RunScript and RunPythonScript regions. For this reason, its syntax highlighting, code-completion, and commenting strategy are all context-sensitive.

Though MacroIDE is hosted in a docking panel in Rhino, it is also able to be run standalone from your desktop (as shown to the right), should you wish to use it outside Rhino.

Though it aims for minimalism in the code editor interface, MacroIDE does nevertheless support extensive customization. The code editor toolbar may be docked to any edge of the editor window, to best suit how you choose to dock (if you do) the MacroIDE panel itself, which is implemented in Rhino as a dockable panel.

Additionally, MacroIDE provides the opportunity to change many aspects of the code editor itself, from the font and color theme (predefined light and dark themes are provided out of the box), to behaviors relating to the use of tabs, whether or not whitespace is indicated, and so forth, as are commonly found in professional IDEs.

Many of the keyboard shortcuts may also be customized, allowing you to tailor the behavior of MacroIDE to match that of your other favorite IDEs. Similarly, syntax highlighting may also be customized to match your personal preferences.

And of course, once you have found just the right combination of options, MacroIDE allows you to save them to a file, whether to be shared, or just loaded again at a later time.

MacroIDE persists your code in three separate ways.

First, when you first open Rhino, MacroIDE remembers the code you were writing in the previous session.

Second, it saves your code in Rhino documents when they are saved, and then reads it back, when they are opened.

And third, it provides a feature called Global Macros (shown at right), which allows you to easily save code, and recall it later, without having to use the file system directly.

This can be very useful when prototyping, or working on several related macros, or just as a way of stashing the current state of the code, before you try making some changes that may or may not end up working out.

And of course, even if you load completely different code into the editor, Undo is always just a click away.

MacroIDE also provides a Macro Compiler, for encapsulating your scripts into standalone Rhino plugins.

This can be very advantageous if, for example, you are someone in your organization who is responsible for providing custom macros and scripts for others, since it removes the possibility that your end users might inadvertently damage the script you’ve written.

And even if you are a solo Rhino user, there is just the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your work, once done, has no chance of having to be re-done.

MacroIDE is compatible with Rhino 5 and 6 (Windows only); the current version can be downloaded here:

MacroIDE-1.1.0.zip

And, the current PDF documentation may be viewed here:

MacroIDE-1.1.0.pdf

To install, simply unzip the download and run the installer program; MacroIDE will be installed and registered with any detected versions of Rhino. The MacroIDE toolbar should be shown on its first startup, but if not, just right-click on any toolbar area in Rhino and enable the MacroIDE toolbar. When you right-click in the toolbar area of a Rhino tab-panel, you should find there is a new MacroIDE panel available.

It is not necessary to purchase a license to use MacroIDE; it will run in trial mode for a period of twenty days from the time it is first loaded into Rhino. After the trial period has expired, MacroIDE will continue to run, but various features will be disabled. To unlock them again, just purchase a license, click the Activate item in the MacroIDE context menu, and enter your license information.

The price for an individual MacroIDE license is $30.00 USD. MacroIDE is licensed on a per-user basis: as a license holder, you are personally entitled to use it on any machine.

MacroIDE purposefully employs none of the typical complicated schemes for detecting over-use, as these cannot help but add complication, ultimately harming the paying customer in a non-zero number of cases, since by definition, such schemes must necessarily err on the side of denial-of-use.

Our hope is that you will appreciate our customer-first approach to this, and repay our trust by helping us to protect our software against unauthorized use.

To purchase a license, just click the PayPal button below. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make your purchase.

Upon completion of payment, an invoice will be shown below with your license key. The invoice will also be sent to the email address you provide to PayPal (and also to the email you registered with on this site, if you are registered).

NOTE: we strongly recommend logging into your account on this site before purchasing, as this will allow you to come back at any time and retrieve your invoice and license key.

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